In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Cash Payment System. Bitcoin has grown for ten years, from a value of 0 to a market value of 200 billion US dollars. Much of this is supported by investment and asset value storage, and Mr. Nakamoto’s hopes for a peer-to-peer cash payment system have not materialized. Bitcoin and other digital currencies supported by the usage of investment only rely on centralized exchange in the secondary market trading, which is even more contrary to the original intention of Nakamoto.

Is digital currency just the same investment hype tool as gold, without extensive practical value? Is the idea of Nakamoto’s peer-to-peer electronic cash payment system just a dream? What is the gap between the broad investment value of consensus to the broad practical value of consensus?

Most of the cryptocurrency including Bitcoin has a low TPS and high gas fee, which is the main disadvantage. The real-life scenario of this drawback can be described as: consumers purchase a pizza worth $20 in Bitcoin need to wait 15 minutes for confirmation and pay an additional $3 fee. The time cost and transaction friction cost of such a payment process are obviously unacceptable for both parties.

Such high transaction costs may be reluctantly accepted by both parties in the process of large-volume low-frequency trading. However, after the completion of transaction, the payee of the transaction will immediately face the dilemma of digital currency price fluctuations and the difficulty of free exchange to legal currency. This dilemma can be described as: after a $500,000 property transaction was completed by Bitcoin, the original landlord received about 5 Bitcoins, and at this moment Bitcoin unfortunately plunged 5%. To minimize loss, the original landlord exchanged Bitcoin for US dollars through the complicated transaction process at the fastest speed. Even if it took only 10 minutes, Bitcoin unfortunately plunged 5% in the 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the landlord lost $50,000 in the payment process. Such risk of value changes is clearly difficult to apply to most large-volume trading scenarios.

From this point of view, the practical value of digital currency has been very narrow. Furthermore, digital currency still lacks the promotion provided by professional payment service agencies, which left them face the difficulty to spread quickly to both consumer and companies.

Faced with so many pain points in use, is Bitcoin only the gold of the digital world?

However, unlike gold, which has unchangeable physical properties, digital currency is a product of computer science that is constantly revolutionizing. Blockchain technology has undergone tremendous upgrades in the past three years, from smart contracts to DPoS consensus, from the first generation of low-performance public chain to the third-generation high-performance public chain. The type of digital currencies, network performance, consensus mechanisms, has realized huge breakthroughs. With the number of digital currency holders significantly increasing, many world’s top enterprises and financial giants have gradually entered the blockchain industry in the past year. The entire industry has already had the technological breakthrough opportunity once again from quantitative change to qualitative change.

At another turning point in the industry, returning to the initial vision of Nakamoto’s peer-to-peer electronic cash payment system is still a huge business opportunity to be seized.

In September 2019, MarcoPolo Network, a project led by SB and WX, officially released a white paper. The project once again embraced Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision of building a peer-to-peer digital cash payment infrastructure with widespread availability. In order to achieve this vision, MarcoPolo Network summarized the achievements and experience of blockchain industry development in recent years, and made in-depth planning in all aspects including the implementation path of underlying technology, openness of consensus mechanism, expansion incentive of user consensus, business support, decentralized governance and so on.

On the technical path, MarcoPolo Network aims to create an interoperable and TPS sharing mechanism across the whole blockchain world, connecting the cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum with strong consensus basis, the stable currency anchored by legal coin value, and the emerging high-performance public chain infrastructure with interoperable network. It will also achieve a point-to-point e-cash system infrastructure that covers the entire encrypted world, with unlimited TPS capacity expansion, ultra-fast validation, state programmable, near-zero transaction costs, low fluctuations to the token’s price in the payment process, and complete replacement of centralized e-cash systems.

In other words, in both BTC and ETH, transfers will be confirmed in seconds or even milliseconds with a close to zero gas fee on the MarcoPolo Network.

MarcoPolo Network has many technological innovations.

The innovative APoS consensus mechanism is adopted, which technically supports that any asset can participate in the calculation of the pledged block. APoS committee communicates and consents through HotStuff protocol. In order to share computing power and performance between each public chain and integrate the resources of each public chain, we designed a set of communication scheduling protocol — Magellan protocol. The Magellan Protocol is a set of protocols built on multiple chains, through which computing power and performance can be shared across all networks to achieve TPS expansion. In the whole network, MarcoPolo Network is responsible for the overall scheduling as a Standard Chain, while a series of Interact Chains are in charge of interactions with other public chains. Standard Chain dynamically allocates transactions and tasks to the chain that will execute these missions according to the load of each connected mainnet.

Each Interact Chain is populated by its ApoS consensus on the chain, and the ApoS assets supported by each Interact Chain can be different. Interact Chain natively supports communication with the Standard Chain, and through a defined set of standard IBC communication interfaces, the Standard Chain completes task assignment.

Remote calls with other public chains are the key to achieve resource sharing among multiple chains. Interact Chain is invoked through the encapsulated bRPC (block chain remote procedure call) architecture.

bRPC is an RPC service architecture for blockchains. Each public chain is abstracted into a single node, and the call to the chain is also a remote procedure call. The RPC request is made through the ClientStub on the Interact Chain and processed by the ServerStub on the corresponding public chain which also send the final result. The entire transaction call process does not need to mind the underlying details and can be completed like a normal transaction.

At present, the address system of the mainstream blockchain adopts the ecdsa signature algorithm, and secp256k1 and ed25519 are the most commonly used elliptic curves. The MarcoPolo Network account system supports multiple addresses and supports the addresses of the two signature algorithms secp256k1 and ed25519 in each account.

In addition, the MarcoPolo Network supports multi-currency in technical solutions and only supports currency-based smart contracts.

Different from other public chains, which focus on the consensus incentives for computing power, a large proportion of the initial circulation of the MarcoPolo main network token MAP is used to subsidize the development of commercial applications. It was also invested in the incentive pool of the PoB community co-construction mechanism to encourage developers who make contributions to the R&D of MAP’s underlying technology. All the incentives will be implemented through on-chain governance, to achieve the full range of open co-construction of computing node, application ecology, developer community and user community.

MarcoPolo Network has developed a plan for the next few years regarding the research and development of main network. Different from other star blockchain projects that only focus on R&D for many years in the early stage, MarcoPolo project has completed the R&D of the light interoperability module – Gravity before the release of the project. Based on this component, the peer-to-peer retail payment application MarcoPolo Pay is planned to launch in Q4 in 2019. It is reported that nearly 10,000 merchants around the world are interested in accessing the payment app, which will be launched soon.

MarcoPolo Network have received investment from institutions and top investment firms. MarcoPolo Network will be the only star project that combines research in cutting-edge technology and development of large-scale applications. It is really hopeful to carry the great aspiration of Satoshi Nakamoto 10 years ago and lead the whole industry to turn upward again.